February 2009 Archives

This continues a discussion about my adventures in Eco-Flackdom.

The green/ethical consumer movement is very promising. It shows just how many people want to make a difference with their purchasing power. However, as long as making a difference stays in the domains of consumer trends and personal ambition, well-meaning impulses can easily be co-opted by polluting industries or those with an anti-science agenda.

 It's not that the green businesses or consumers shouldn't be doing their thing, it's that they need to constantly think critically about the information they get, and make sure that they remain citizens first and consumers second. The last 30+ years of environmental history have shown us that it's easy for those who make a career or hobby out of environmental advocacy to lose site of people with less access to educational opportunity or resources to make their communities clean and safe. 

For me, the shift from Environmental Consumer to Citizen resulted from a combination of the TreeHugger breaching, crazy domestic spying/terrorism, and watching a Movie called Cache. I saw that if we failed to take care of each other by protecting one another's rights, our environmental concerns might prove meaningless.

When you’ve been terrorized by a group of people, how do you refuse to tolerate their tactics without losing sight of their humanity? Before spending a lot of time discussing this on Monday I didn’t realize that this was a central question I’d been grappling with.

For a long while, each interaction with individual participants in the anti-Kyeann and Mom terror campaign was painfully taxing. How could this person hate me bad enough to poison my food? Try to upset me while cutting my hair? Ridicule me based on private information he never should have been able to access? Take part in an entrapment scheme? Place listening or viewing devices in my home? Stalk me?

There have been a variety of players with a variety of motivations but it’s clear that there is a small army of extreme right wing zealots in our city, ready to be activated to terrorize people when given the go-ahead. It’s also clear that in our case this is a culmination of years of ideologically based harassment. What they have taken part in recently is the dictionary definition of terrorism: “the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.”

Two years ago, before the Orwellian nightmare kicked into full effect, I was becoming reasonably happy with the life that was taking shape. Somehow, both my mother and I were repeatedly bouncing back from all of the covert manipulation and interference that we did not realize was coordinated. I would find myself driving down Montana's Bitterrot Valley to pick up a side of beef one week, and riding a New York subway the next. I loved the "city mouse/country mouse" dichotomies and constant movement -- my plan was to set up a three-city Missoula/New York/Paris existence, writing about eco-fashion and leading eco-fashion and other tours.

Ironically, if the people who had been trying to destroy my life left me alone to take that path, I would likely have just created a lovely existence in the eco-PR bubble. My thesis might not have focused on faux post-environmentalism. I wouldn't have understood the limitations of my well-intentioned but misguided focus on image-making as the route to social change. I wouldn't have finally begun to break out of the inadvertent racism that kept me frozen, unable to understand what small part I could play in redressing injustices that I had not created.